The Terror of the Otherland

There is a faraway place where rotting things roam. Great beasts that travel between worlds, journeying, consuming, scavenging.

They are known by many names, but some call them void spawn. Massive worms made of torn flesh that seek sustenance for their hive. They slither through the air with disgusting speed and grace. The smallest among them leap down men’s throats and eat them from within. The largest consume cities.

They venture all around, tearing worlds to shreds. They kill families, farmers, kings, and soldiers all. They rot the worlds they touch. They decay and multiply and breed and rot, and turn the bright green lands damp and grey, full of the hive’s invading life. Egg patches and parasite nests stretching across ruined cities.

No one knows why the beasts are the way they are, what act of god or devil made them. But we do know where they began.

For the most terrible of the worlds they’ve touched is the first home. Their place of origin. The hive from hell.

I’ve met many who traveled there. Scientists, poets, the brave, and the foolish. Each has their own story of that place. But no words can do it justice. So awful is the nest.

They rip apart the entrails and organs of their victims and secrete a substance to turn the flesh into building stuff. With this grisly mortar they build their hive larger and larger, ever expanding.

A massive horrid box stretching up and across forever in every direction. Riddled with pores big and small for the creatures to fly through.

A castle made of gore. A nest made of suffering.

A fortress made out of the corpses of countless animals and people. Billions must have died to form their keep. The smell of it so awful as to make its nature known.

Within this horrid place a million creatures live. Insects and parasites, worms and centipedes. Blood sucking flies the size of tacks and eldritch monsters the size of ships.

No one knows what lies in the center of the hive. Many have ventured, daring to find. Their corpses now make up the building's walls.

But I met one traveler, one who had ventured in very far and who had returned. A researcher by nature. He told me his story. He spoke about how he crawled over the decaying corpses of millions on a quest for science. How he saw the worms, how they fed, how they devoured.

Apparently while studying the beasts, those void spawn, he noticed almost none were quite the same. Somehow all different in form, function, and mannerism.

Some preferred to digest their prey alive by spitting acid and drinking their remains. Others had incredible rows of complex bones within them that seemed to dissect whatever they consumed. Almost as if they were studying what they ate.

What an uncanny intellect some of them had.

Of the other details I will not spare them. To know them myself causes me great torment. To spread that knowledge would be a curse. But there is one thing I will share as to give you an idea of what lies within.

I will tell you of something the traveler noticed on his first weeks exploring.

He said to me of all the things he’d seen this particular detail had disturbed him greatly.

Most of the tunnels were cold and damp. But the officers, the higher in rank and more powerful of the void spawn, their tunnels were warm.

Somehow heated in a way he couldn’t understand.

It was only after several moments that he inspected the grizzly wall made of gore around him and realized what made the tunnel so cozy. What provided all the heat.

The bodies that made up the walls, they were breathing.